'Now, however, Isabel has asserted herself in several unexpected ways. She has refused altogether to open her autumn season with the play which had been nearly decided on before they left London—a flimsy spectacular performance quite unworthy of her. As soon as possible she will make important changes in the troupe who are to be with her, and at the beginning of September she is coming to stay three weeks with us in Paris, and, in all probability (though the world is to know nothing of it), Perrault of the Conservatoire, who is a great friend of ours, will give her a good deal of positive teaching. This last arrangement is particularly exasperating to Mr. Worrall. He regards it as sure to be known, a ridiculous confession of weakness on Isabel's part, and so on. However, in spite of his wrath and the aunt's sullen or tearful disapproval, she has stood firm, and matters are so arranged.'
* * * * *
'Saturday night, August25.
'This evening we persuaded her at last to give us some scenes of Juliet. How I wish you could have been here! It was one of those experiences which remain with one as a sort of perpetual witness to the poetry which life holds in it, and may yield up to one at any moment. It was in our little garden; the moon was high above the houses opposite, and the narrow canal running past our side railing into the Grand Canal was a shining streak of silver. The air was balmy and absolutely still; no more perfect setting to Shakespeare or to Juliet could have been imagined. Paul sat at a little table in front of the rest of us; he was to read Romeo and the Nurse in the scenes she had chosen, while in the background were the Worralls and Lucy Bretherton (the little crippled sister), Mr. Wallace, and myself. She did the balcony scene, the morning scene with Romeo, the scene with the nurse after Tybalt's death, and the scene of the philtre. There is an old sundial in the garden, which caught the moonbeams. She leaned her arms upon it, her eyes fixed upon the throbbing moonlit sky, her white brocaded dress glistening here and there in the pale light—a vision of perfect beauty. And when she began her sighing appeal—
"O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?"
—it seemed to me as if the night—the passionate Italian night—had found its voice—the only voice which fitted it.
'Afterwards I tried as much as possible to shake off the impressions peculiar to the scene itself to think of her under the ordinary conditions of the stage, to judge her purely as an actress. In the love scenes there seemed hardly anything to find fault with. I thought I could trace in many places the influence of her constant dramatic talks and exercises with Paul. The flow of passion was continuous and electric, but marked by all the simpleness, all the sweetness, all the young winsome extravagance which belong to Juliet. The great scene with the Nurse had many fine things in it; she has evidently worked hard at it line by line, and that speech of Juliet's, with its extraordinary dramatic capabilities—
"Shall I speak ill of him that is my husband?"—
was given with admirable variety and suppleness of intonation. The dreary sweetness of her
"Banished!that one wordbanished!"
still lives with me, and her gestures as she paced restlessly along the little strip of moonlit path. The speech before she takes the potion was the least satisfactory of all; the ghastliness and horror of it are beyond her resources as yet; she could not infuse them with that terrible beauty which Desforêts would have given to every line. But where is the English actress that has ever yet succeeded in it?
We were all silent for a minute after her great cry—
"Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, I drink to thee!"—
had died upon our ears. And then, while we applauded her, she came forward listlessly, her beautiful head drooping, and approached Paul like a child that has said its lesson badly.
'"I can't do it, that speech; I can't do it!"
'"It wants more work," said Paul; "you'll get it. But the rest was admirable. You must have worked very hard!"
'"So I have," she said, brightening at the warmth of his praise. "But Diderot is wrong, wrong, wrong! When I could once reach the feeling of the Tybalt speech, when I could oncehatehim for killing Tybalt in the same breath in which Ilovedhim for being Romeo, all was easy; gesture and movement came to me; I learnt them, and the thing was done."
'The reference, of course, meant that Paul had been reading to her his favouriteParadoxe sur le Comédien, and that she had been stimulated, but not converted, by the famous contention that the actor should be the mere "cold and tranquil spectator," the imitator of other men's feelings, while possessing none of his own. He naturally would have argued, but I would not have it, and made her rest. She was quite worn out with the effort, and I do not like this excessive fatigue of hers. I often wonder whether the life she is leading is not too exciting for her. This is supposed to be her holiday, and she is really going through more brain-waste than she has ever done in her life before! Paul is throwing his whole energies into one thing only, the training of Miss Bretherton; and he is a man of forty-eight, with an immense experience, and she a girl of twenty-one, with everything to learn, and as easily excited as he is capable of exciting her. I really must keep him in check.
'Mr. Wallace, when we had sent her home across the canal—their apartment is on the other side, farther up towards the railway station—could not say enough to me of his amazement at the change in her.
'"What have you done to her?" he asked. "I can hardly recognise the old Miss Bretherton at all. Is it really not yet four months since your brother and I went to see her in theWhite Lady? Why, you have bewitched her!"
'"We have done something, I admit," I said; "but the power you see developed in her now was roused in her when months ago she first came in contact with the new world and the new ideal which you and Eustace represented to her."
'There, my dear Eustace, have I given you your due? Oh, Miss Bretherton says so many kind things about you! I'll take especial pains to tell you some of them next time I write.'
* * * * *
'VENICE,August27.
'MY DEAR KENDAL—This has been a day of events which, I believe, will interest you as much as they did me. I told Madame de Châteauvieux that I should write to you to-night, and my letter, she says, must do in place of one from her for a day or two. We have been to Torcello to-day—your sister, M. de Châteauvieux, Miss Bretherton, and I. The expedition itself was delightful, but that I have no time to describe. I only want to tell you what happened when we got to Torcello.
'But first, you will, of course, know from your sister's letters—she tells me she writes to you twice a week—how absorbed we have all been in the artistic progress of Miss Bretherton. I myself never saw such a change, such an extraordinary development in any one. How was it that you and I did not see farther into her? I see now, as I look back upon her old self, that the new self was there in germ. But I think perhaps it may have been the vast disproportion of her celebrity to her performance that blinded us to the promise in her; it was irritation with the public that made us deliver an over-hasty verdict on her.
'However that may be, I have been making up my mind for some days past that the embassy on behalf ofElvira, which I thrust upon you, and which you so generously undertook, was a blunder on my part which it would be delightful to repair, and which no artistic considerations whatever need prevent me from repairing. You cannot think how divine she was in Juliet the other night. Imperfect and harsh, of course, here and there, but still a creature to build many and great hopes upon, if ever there was one. She is shaking off trick after trick; your brother-in-law is merciless to them whenever they appear, and she is for ever working with a view to his approval, and also, I think, from two or three things she has said, with a memory of that distant standard of criticism which she believes to be embodied in you!
'M. de Châteauvieux has devoted himself to her; it is a pretty sight to see them together. Your sister and she, too, are inseparable, and Madame de Châteauvieux's quiet, equable refinement makes a good contrast to Miss Bretherton's mobility. She will never lose the imprint of her friendship with these two people; it was a happy thought which led you to bring them together.
'Well, we went to Torcello, and I watched for an opportunity of getting her alone. At last Madame de Châteauvieux gave me one; she carried off her husband, Ruskin in hand, to study the mosaics, and Miss Bretherton and I were left sitting under the outer wall of San Fosca till they should come back. We had been talking of a hundred things—not of acting at all; of the pomegranates, of which she had a scarlet mass in her lap, of the gray slumberous warmth of the day, or the ragged children who pestered us for coppers—and then suddenly, I asked her whether she would answer me a personal question: Was there any grudge in her mind towards me for anything I had said and done in London, or caused others to say and do for me?
'She was much startled, and coloured a good deal, but she said very steadily: "I feel no sort of grudge; I never had any cause." "Well, then," I went on, throwing myself down on the grass before her that I might really see her expression, "if you bear me no grudge, if you feel kindly towards me, will you help me to undo a great mistake of mine?"
'She looked at me with parted lips and eyes which seemed to be trying to find out from my face what I meant. "Will you," I said, hurrying on; "will you take from meElvira, and do what you like with it?" And then, do you know what happened? Her lips quivered, and I thought she was on the point of tears, but suddenly the nervousness of each of us seemed to strike the other, and we both laughed—she long and helplessly, as if she could not help herself.
'Presently she looked up, with her great eyes swimming in tears, and tried to impress on me that I was speaking hastily, that I had an ideal for that play she could never promise to reach, that it was my friendship for her that made me change my mind, that there might be practical difficulties now that so many arrangements had been made, and so on. But I would not listen to her. I had it all ready; I had an actor to propose to her for Macias, and even the costumes in my mind, ready to sketch for her, if need were. Forbes, I suggested, might and would direct the setting of the piece; no one could do it with more perfect knowledge or a more exquisite taste; and for her, as we both knew, he would turn scene-painter, if necessary. And so I rambled on, soothing her shaken feeling and my own until she had let me beguile her out of her attitude of reluctance and shrinking into one at least of common interest.
'But by the time the others came back I had not got a direct consent out of her, and all the way home she was very silent. I, of course, got anxious, and began to think that my blunder had been irreparable; but, at any rate, I was determined not to let the thing linger on. So that, when the Châteauvieux asked me to stay and sup with them and her, I supped, and afterwards in the garden boldly brought it out before them all, and appealed to your sister for help. I knew that both she and her husband were acquainted with what had happened at Oxford, and I supposed that Miss Bretherton would know that they were, so that it was awkward enough. Only that women, when they please, have such tact, such an art of smoothing over and ignoring the rough places of life, that one often with them gets through a difficult thing without realising how difficult it is. M. de Châteauvieux smoked a long time and said nothing, then he asked me a great many questions about the play, and finally gave no opinion. I was almost in despair—she said so little—until, just as I was going away withElvira'sfate still quite unsettled, she said to me with a smile and a warm pressure of the hand, "To-morrow come and see me, and I will tell you yes or no!"
'And to-day I have been to see her, and the night has brought good luck! ForElvira, my dear Kendal, will be produced on or about the 20th November, in this year of grace, and Isabel Bretherton will play the heroine, and your friend is already plunged in business, and aglow with hope and expectation. How I wish—how we all wish—that you were here! I feel more and more penitent towards you. It was you who gave the impulse of which the results are ripening, and you ought to be here with us now, playing in the body that friend's part which we all yield you so readily in spirit. "Tell Mr. Kendal," were almost her last words to me, "that I cannot say how much I owe to his influence and his friendship. He first opened my eyes to so many things. He was so kind to me, even when he thought least of me. I hope I shall win a word of praise from him yet!" There! I trust that will rouse a little pleasant conceit in you. She meant it, and it is true. I must go off and work at many things. To-morrow or next day, after some further talk with her, I shall set off homewards, look up Forbes and begin operations. She will be in town in about three weeks from now—as you know she is going to stay first with your sister in Paris—and then we shall have hard work till about the middle of November, when I suppose the play will be produced. This will be more than a fortnight later than she intended to open, and Mr. Worrall will probably be furious over the delay, but she has developed a will of her own lately.
'Au revoirthen. You must have had a peaceful summer with your books and your heather. I wish I had anything like the same digestion for work that you have; I never saw a man get as much pleasure out of his books as you do. To me, I confess, that work is always work, and idleness a joy!
'However, no more idleness for me for a good while to come. How grand she will be in that last act!—Where were my eyes last spring?—I wish there were a chance of her seeing much that is interesting in Paris. However, flat as September generally is, she will get some Molière at theFrançais, and your sister will take care that she sees the right people. Perrault, I hear, is to give her lessons—under the rose. Happy man!'
* * * * *
Kendal read this letter on a glowing August morning as he walked homeward along the side of the pond, where the shade of the fir-trees was a welcome protection against the rising heat, and the air was fragrant with the scent of the ling, which was just out in all its first faint flush of beauty. He threw himself down among it after he had finished the sheets, and stared for long at the sunlit motionless water, his hat drawn forward over his brows. So this was the outcome of it all. Isabel Bretherton was about to become a great actress,—Undine had found her soul!
It seemed to him, as he lay there buried in the ling, that during the past three weeks he had lived through a whole drama of feeling—a drama which had its beginning, its complications, its climax. While it had been going on he had been only half-conscious of its bearings, half-conscious of himself. Wallace's letter had made him sensible of the situation, as it concerned himself, with a decisive sharpness and completeness. There was no possibility of any further self-delusion: the last defences were overcome, the last veil between himself and the pursuing force which had overtaken him had fallen, and Kendal, with a shiver of pain, found himself looking straight into the wide, hungry eyes of Love! Oh, was this love,—this sore desire, this dumb craving, this restlessness of the whole being?
The bees hummed among the heather, every now and then a little brown-streaked lizard rustled faintly beside him, a pair of kingfishers flashed across the pond. But he saw and heard nothing, responsive as every sense in him commonly was to the details of the wild life about him. His own miserable reverie absorbed him. What was it that had made the charm of those early weeks in July immediately after his parting with her? What was it which had added zest to his work, and enchantment to the summer beauty of the country, and, like a hidden harmony dimly resonant within him, had kept life tuneful and delightful? He could put words to it now. It had been nothing less than a settled foresight, a deep conviction, ofIsabel Bretherton's failure! What a treachery! But yes,—the vision perpetually before his eyes had been the vision of a dying fame, a waning celebrity, a forsaken and discrowned beauty! And from that abandonment and that failure he had dimly foreseen the rise and upspringing of new and indescribable joy. He had seen her, conscious of defeat and of the inexorable limits of her own personality, turning to the man who had read her truly and yet had loved her, surely, from the very beginning, and finding in his love a fresh glory and an all-sufficient consolation. This had been the inmost truth, the centre, the kernel of all his thought, of all his life. He saw it now with sharp distinctness,—now that every perception was intensified by pain and longing.
Then, as he went over the past, he saw how this consciousness had been gradually invaded and broken up by his sister's letters. He remembered the incredulous impatience with which he had read the earlier ones. So, Marie thought him mistaken! 'Isabel Bretherton would be an actress yet'—'she had genius, after all'—'she was learning, growing, developing every day.' Absurd!He, had been able to keep his critical estimate of the actress and his personal admiration of the woman separate from one another. But evidently Marie's head had been confused, misled, by her heart. And then, little by little, his incredulity had yielded, and his point of view had changed. Instead of impatience of Marie's laxity of judgment, what he had been fiercely conscious of for days was jealousy of Paul de Châteauvieux—jealousy of his opportunities, his influence, his relation towards that keen sweet nature. That, too, had been one of his dreams of the future,—the dream of tutoring and training her young unformed intelligence. He had done something towards it; he had, as it were, touched the spring which had set free all this new and unexpected store of power. But, if he had planted, others had watered, and others would reap. In this great crisis of her fortunes he had been nothing to her. Other voices and other hands had guided and directed her. Her kindly, grateful messages only stung and tortured him. They seemed to him the merest friendly commonplace. In reality her life had passed out of his ken; her nature had flowered into a new perfection, and he had not been there to see or to help. She would never connect him with the incidents or the influences which had transformed existence to her, and would probably irrevocably change the whole outline of her future. Once he had wounded and startled her, and had despaired for awhile of undoing the impression made upon her. But now he felt no quick anxiety, no fear how things might turn, only a settled flat consciousness of division, of a life that had once been near to his swept away from him for ever, of diverging roads which no kindly fate would ever join again.
For, by the end of this time of solitary waiting, his change of attitude was complete. It was evident to him that his anticipation of her failure, potent as it had been over his life, had never been half so real, half so vivid, as this new and strange foreboding of her true success. Marie must be right. He had been a mere blind hair-splitting pedant, judging Isabel Bretherton by principles and standards which left out of count the inborn energy, the natural power of growth, of such a personality as hers. And the more he had once doubted the more he now believed. Yes, she would be great—she would make her way into that city of the mind, in which he himself had made his dwelling-place; she, too, would enter upon the world's vast inheritance of knowledge. She would become, if only her physical frame proved equal to the demands upon it, one of that little band of interpreters, of ministers of the idea, by whom the intellectual life of a society is fed and quickened. Was he so lost in his own selfish covetous need as not to rejoice?
Oh, but she was a woman, she was beautiful, and he loved her! Do what he would, all ideal and impersonal considerations fell utterly away from him. Day by day he knew more of his own heart; day by day the philosopher grew weaker in him, and the man's claim fiercer. Before him perpetually were two figures of a most human and practical reality. He saw a great actress, absorbed in the excitement of the most stimulating of lives, her power ripening from year to year, her fame growing and widening with time; and beside this brilliant vision he saw himself, the quiet man of letters, with the enthusiasms of youth behind him, the calm of middle-age before him. What possible link could there be between them?
At last Wallace's letter cleared still further the issues of the conflict; or rather, it led to Kendal's making a fatalist compact with himself. He was weary of the struggle, and it seemed to him that he must somehow or other escape from the grip in which his life was held. He must somehow deaden this sense, this bitter sense of loss, if it were only by postponing the last renunciation. He would go back to his work and force himself not to hate it. It was his only refuge, and he must cling to it for dear life. And he would not see her again till the night of the first performance ofElvira. She would be in London in a month's time, but he would take care to be out of reach. He would not meet those glorious eyes or touch that hand again till the die was cast,—upon the fate ofElvirahe staked his own. The decision brought him a strange kind of peace, and he went back to his papers and his books like a man who has escaped from the grasp of some deadly physical ill into a period of comparative ease and relief.
It was a rainy November night. A soft continuous downpour was soaking the London streets, without, however, affecting their animation or the nocturnal brightness of the capital, for the brilliance of the gas-lamps was flashed back from innumerable patches of water, and every ray of light seemed to be broken by the rain into a hundred shimmering reflections. It was the hour when all the society of which an autumnal London can boast is in the streets, hurrying to its dinner or its amusements, and when the stream of diners-out, flowing through the different channels of the west, is met in all the great thoroughfares by the stream of theatre-goers setting eastward.
The western end of D—— Street was especially crowded, and so was the entrance to a certain narrow street leading northwards from it, in which stood the new bare buildings of theCalliope. Outside the theatre itself there was a dense mass of carriages and human beings, only kept in order by the active vigilance of the police, and wavering to and fro with kaleidoscopic rapidity. The line of carriages seemed interminable, and, after those who emerged from them had run the gauntlet of the dripping, curious, good-tempered multitude outside, they had to face the sterner ordeal of the struggling well-dressed crowd within, surging up the double staircase of the newly-decorated theatre. The air inside was full of the hum of talk, and the whole crowd had a homogeneous, almost a family air, as though the contents of one great Londonsalonhad been poured into the theatre. Everybody seemed to know everybody else; there were politicians, and artists, and writers of books, known and unknown; there were fair women and wise women and great ladies; and there was that large substratum of faithful, but comparatively nameless, persons on whom a successful manager learns to depend with some confidence on any first night of importance.
And this was a first night of exceptional interest. So keen, indeed, had been the competition for tickets that many of those present had as vague and confused an idea of how they came to be among the favoured multitude pouring into theCalliopeas a man in a street panic has of the devices by which he has struggled past the barrier which has overthrown his neighbour. Miss Bretherton's first appearance inElvirahad been the subject of conversation for weeks past among a far larger number of London circles than generally concern themselves with theatrical affairs. Among those which might be said to be within a certain literary and artistic circumference, people were able to give definite grounds for the public interest. The play, it was said, was an unusually good one, and the progress of the rehearsals had let loose a flood of rumours to the effect that Miss Bretherton's acting in it would be a great surprise to the public. Further, from the intellectual centre of things, it was only known that the famous beauty had returned to the scene of her triumphs; and that now, as in the season, one of the first articles of the social decalogue laid it down as necessary that you should, first of all, see her in the theatre, and, secondly, know her—by fair means if possible, if not, by crooked ones—in society.
It was nearly a quarter to eight. The orchestra had taken their places, and almost every seat was full. In one of the dress-circle boxes sat three people who had arrived early, and had for some time employed themselves in making a study of the incoming stream through their opera-glasses. They were Eustace Kendal, his sister, Madame de Châteauvieux, and her husband. The Châteauvieux had travelled over from Paris expressly for the occasion, and Madame de Châteauvieux, her gray-blue eyes sparkling with expectation and all her small delicate features alive with interest and animation, was watching for the rising of the heavy velvet curtain with an eagerness which brought down upon her the occasional mockery of her husband, who was in reality, however, little less excited than herself. It was but three weeks since they had parted with Isabel Bretherton in Paris, and they were feeling on this first night something of the anxiety and responsibility which parents feel when they launch a child upon whom they have expended their best efforts into a critical world.
As for Eustace, he also had but that afternoon arrived in London. He had been paying a long duty-visit to some aged relatives in the North, and had so lengthened it out, in accordance with the whim which had taken possession of him in Surrey, that he had missed all the preparations forElvira, and had arrived upon the scene only at the moment when the finalcoupwas to be delivered. Miss Bretherton had herself sent him a warm note of invitation, containing an order for the first night and an appeal to him to come and 'judge me as kindly as truth will let you.' And he had answered her that, whatever happened, he would be in his place in theCalliopeon the night of the 20th of November.
And now here he was, wearing outwardly precisely the same aspect of interested expectation as those around him, and all the time conscious inwardly that to him alone, of all the human beings in that vast theatre, the experience of the evening would be so vitally and desperately important, that life on the other side of it would bear the mark of it for ever. It was a burden to him that his sister suspected nothing of his state of feeling; it would have consoled him that she should know it, but it seemed to him impossible to tell her.
'There are the Stuarts,' he said, bending down to her as the orchestra struck up, 'in the box to the left. Forbes, I suppose, will join them when it begins. I am told he has been working like a horse for this play. Every detail in it, they say, is perfect, artistically and historically, and the time of preparation has been exceptionally short. Why did she refuse to begin again with theWhite Lady, to give herself more time?'
'I cannot tell you, except that she had a repugnance to it which could not be got over. I believe her associations with the play were so painful that it would have seemed an evil omen to her to begin a new season with it.'
'Was she wise, I wonder?'
'I think she did well to follow her fancy in the matter, and she herself has had plenty of time. She was working at it all the weeks she was with us, and young Harting, too, I think had notice enough. Some of the smaller parts may go roughly to-night, but they will soon fall into shape.'
'Poor Wallace!' said Kendal; 'he must be wishing it well over. I never saw a house better stocked with critics.'
'Here he is,' cried Madame de Châteauvieux, betraying her suppressed excitement in her nervous little start. 'Oh, Mr. Wallace, how do you do? and how are things going?'
Poor Wallace threw himself into his seat, looking the picture of misery so far as his face, which Nature had moulded in one of her cheerfullest moods, was capable of it.
'My dear Madame de Châteauvieux, I have no more notion than the man in the moon. Miss Bretherton is an angel, and without Forbes we should have collapsed a hundred times already, and that's about all I know. As for the other actors, I suppose they will get through their parts somehow, but at present I feel like a man at the foot of the gallows. There goes the hell; now for it.'
The sketch for the play ofElvirahad been found among the papers of a young penniless Italian who had died, almost of starvation, in his Roman garret, during those teeming years after 1830, when poets grew on every hedge and the romantic passion was abroad. The sketch had appeared in a little privately-printed volume which Edward Wallace had picked up by chance on the Paris quays. He had read it in an idle hour in a railway, had seen its capabilities, and had forthwith set to work to develop the sketch into a play. But, in developing it, he had carefully preserved the character of the original conception. It was a conception strictly of the Romantic time, and the execution of it presented very little of that variety of tone which modern audiences have learnt to expect. The play told one rapid breathless story of love, jealousy, despair, and death, and it told it directly and uninterruptedly, without any lighter interludes. Author and adapter alike had trusted entirely to the tragic force of the situation and the universality of the motives appealed to. The diction of the piece was the diction of Alfred de Vigny or of the school of Victor Hugo. It was, indeed, rather a dramatic love-poem than a play, in the modern sense, and it depended altogether for its success upon the two characters of Macias and Elvira.
In devising the character of Macias the Italian author had made use of a traditional Spanish type, which has its historical sources, and has inspired many a Spanish poet from the fifteenth century downwards. Macias is knight, poet, and lover; his love is a kind of southern madness which withers every other feeling in its neighbourhood, and his tragic death is the only natural ending to a career so fierce and uncontrolled. Elvira, with whom Macias is in love, the daughter of Nuno Fernandez, is embodied gentleness and virtue, until the fierce progress of her fate has taught her that men are treacherous and the world cruel. For her love had been prosperous and smooth until, by a series of events, it had been brought into antagonism with two opposing interests—those of her father and of a certain Fernan Perez, the tool and favourite of the powerful Duke of Villena. The ambition and selfish passion of these two men are enlisted against her. Perez is determined to marry her; her father is determined to sweep Macias out of the path of his own political advancement. The intrigue devised between the two is perfectly successful. Macias is enticed away; Elvira, forced to believe that she is deserted and betrayed, is half driven, half entrapped, into a marriage with Perez; and Macias, returning to claim her against a hundred obstacles, meets the wedding party on their way back to the palace of the Duke. The rest of the play represented, of course, the struggle between the contending forces thus developed. In plan and mechanism the story was one of a common romantic type, neither better nor worse than hundreds of others of which the literary archives of the first half of the present century are full. It required all the aid that fine literary treatment could give it to raise it above the level of vulgar melodrama and turn it into tragedy. But fortune had been kind to it; the subject had been already handled in the Italian sketch with delicacy and a true tragic insight, and Edward Wallace had brought all the resources of a very evenly-trained and critical mind to bear upon his task. It could hardly have been foreseen that he would be attracted by the subject, but once at work upon it he had worked with enthusiasm.
The curtain drew up on the great hall of the Villena Palace. Everything that antiquarian knowledge could do had been brought to bear upon the surroundings of the scene; the delicate tilework of the walls and floor, the leather hangings, the tapestries, the carved wood and brass work of a Spanish palace of the fifteenth century, had been copied with lavish magnificence; and the crowded expectant house divided its attention and applause during the first scene between the beauty and elaboration of its setting and the play of the two tolerable actors who represented Elvira's father and the rival of Macias, Fernan Perez.
Fernan Perez, having set the intrigue on foot which is to wreck the love of Macias and Elvira, had just risen from his seat, when Wallace, who was watching the stage in a torment of mingled satisfaction and despair, touched Madame de Châteauvieux's arm.
'Now!' he said. 'That door to the left.'
Kendal, catching the signal, rose from his seat behind Madame de Châteauvieux and bent forward. The great door at the end of the palace had slowly opened, and gliding through it with drooping head and hands clasped before her came Elvira, followed by her little maid Beatriz. The storm which greeted her appearance was such as thrilled the pulses of the oldesthabituéin the theatre. Tears came to Madame de Châteauvieux's eyes, and she looked up at her brother.
'What a scene! It is overpowering—it is too much for her! I wish they would let her go on!'
Kendal made no answer, his soul was in his eyes; he had no senses for any but one person.Shewas there, within a few yards of him, in all the sovereignty of her beauty and her fame, invested with the utmost romance that circumstances could bestow, and about, if half he heard were true, to reap a great artistic, no less than a great personal triumph. Had he felt towards her only as the public felt it would have been an experience beyond the common run, and as it was—oh, this aching, intolerable sense of desire, of separation, of irremediable need! Was that her voice? He had heard that tone of despair in it before—under over-arching woods, when the June warmth was in the air! That white outstretched hand had once lain close clasped in his own; those eyes had once looked with a passionate trouble into his. Ah, it was gone for ever, nothing would ever recall it—that one quick moment of living contact! In a deeper sense than met the ear, she was on the stage and he among the audience. To the end his gray life would play the part of spectator to hers, or else she would soon have passed beyond his grasp and touch, just as Elvira would have vanished in a little while from the sight of the great audience which now hung upon her every movement.
Then from the consciousness of his own private smart he was swept out, whether he would or no, into the general current of feeling which was stirring the multitude of human beings around him, and he found himself gradually mastered by considerations of a different order altogether. Was this the actress he had watched with such incessant critical revolt six months before? Was this the half-educated girl, grasping at results utterly beyond her realisation, whom he remembered?
It seemed to him impossible that this quick artistic intelligence, this nervous understanding of the demands made upon her, this faculty in meeting them, could have been developed by the same Isabel Bretherton whose earlier image was so distinctly graven on his memory. And yet his trained eye learned after a while to decipher in a hundred indications the past history of the change. He saw how she had worked, and where; the influences which had been brought to bear upon her were all familiar to him; they had been part of his own training, and they belonged, as he knew, to the first school of dramatic art in Europe—to the school which keeps alive from generation to generation the excellence and fame of the best French drama. He came to estimate by degrees all that she had done; he saw also all she had still to do. In the spring she had been an actress without a future, condemned by the inexorable logic of things to see her fame desert her with the first withering of her beauty. Now she had, as it were, but started towards her rightful goal, but her feet were in the great high-road, and Kendal saw before her, if she had but strength to reach it, the very highest summit of artistic success.
The end of the first act was reached; Elvira, returning from the performance of the marriage ceremony in the chapel of the palace, had emerged hand-in-hand with her husband, and, followed by her wedding train, upon the great hall. She had caught sight of Macias standing blanched and tottering under the weight of the incredible news which had just been given to him by the Duke. She had flung away the hateful hand which held her, and, with a cry, instinct with the sharp and terrible despair of youth, she had thrown herself at the feet of her lover.
When the curtain fell, Edward Wallace could have had few doubts—if he had ever cherished any—of the success of his play. He himself escaped behind the scenes as soon as Miss Bretherton's last recall was over, and the box was filled in his absence with a stream of friends, and a constant murmur of congratulation, which was music in the ears of Madame de Châteauvieux, and, for the moment, silenced in Kendal his own throbbing and desolate consciousness.
'There never was a holiday turned to such good account before,' a gray-haired dramatic critic was saying to her, a man with whose keen, good-natured face London had been familiar for the last twenty years. 'What magic has touched the beauty, Madame de Châteauvieux? Last spring we all felt as though one fairy godmother at least had been left out at the christening. And now it would seem as though even she had repented of it, and brought her gift with the rest. Well, well, I always felt there was something at the bottom in that nature that might blossom yet. Most people who are younger at the trade than I would not hear of it. It was commonly agreed that her success would last just as long as the first freshness of her beauty, and no more. Andnow—the English stage has laid its hold at last upon a great actress.'
Madame de Châteauvieux's smiling reply was broken by the reappearance ofWallace, round whom the buzz of congratulation closed with fresh vigour.
'How is she?' asked Madame de Châteauvieux, laying a hand on his arm.'Tired?'
'Not the least! But, of course, all the strain is to come. It is amazing, you know, this reception. It's almost more trying than the acting. Forbes in the wings, looking on, is a play in himself!'
In another minute the hubbub had swept out again, and the house had settled into silence.
Macias was the central figure of the second act. In the great scene of explanation between himself and Elvira, after he had forced his way into her apartment, his fury of jealous sarcasm, broken by flashes of the old absolute trust, of the old tender worship, had been finely conceived, and was well rendered by the promising young actor, whom Wallace had himself chosen for the part, Elvira, overwhelmed by the scorn and despair of her lover, and, conscious of the treachery which has separated them, is yet full of a blind resolve to play the part she has assumed to the bitter end, to save her own name and her father's from dishonour, and to interpose the irrevocable barrier of her marriage vow between herself and Macias. Suddenly they are interrupted by the approach of the Duke and of Fernan Perez. Elvira throws herself between her husband and her lover, and, having captured the sword of Macias, hands it to the Duke. Macias is arrested after a tumultuous scene, and is led away, shaking off Elvira's efforts to save him with bitter contempt, and breaking loose from her with the prophecy that in every joy of the future and every incident of her wedded life, the spectre of his murdered love will rise before her, and 'every echo and every breeze repeat the fatal name, Macias.'
During the rapid give and take of this trying scene Kendal saw with a kind of incredulous admiration that Isabel Bretherton never once lost herself, that every gesture was true, every word struck home. Her extraordinary grace, her marvellous beauty were all subordinated to, forgotten almost in the supreme human passion speaking through her. Macias, in the height of his despair while he was still alone with her, had flung her his sword, declaring that he would go forth and seek his death an unarmed and defenceless man. Then, when he becomes conscious of the approach of his rival, the soldier's instinct revives in him; he calls for his sword; she refuses it, and he makes a threatening step towards her.
'Mac. My sword, Elvira.
Elvira. Never!
Beatriz. Ah! they are here. It is too late!
Elvira. Go! No blood shall flow for me. Come no nearer—or I sheathe it in this breast.'
All the desperate energy of a loving woman driven to bay was in her attitude as she repelled Macias, whereas in the agony of her last clinging appeal to him, as his guards lead him off, every trace of her momentary heroism had died away. Faint and trembling, recoiling from every harsh word of his as from a blow, she had followed him towards the door, and in her straining eyes and seeking, outstretched hands as she watched him disappear, there was a pathos so true, so poignant, that it laid a spell upon the audience, and the curtain fell amid a breathless silence, which made the roar that almost instantly followed doubly noticeable.
But it was in the third act that she won her highest triumph. The act opened with a scene between Elvira and her husband, in which she implored him, with the humility and hopelessness of grief, to allow her to retire from the world and to hide the beauty which had wrought such ruin from the light of day. He, in whom jealousy has taken fierce root, refuses with reproach and insult, and in the full tide of her passionate reaction against his tyranny, the news is brought her by Beatriz that Fernan, in his determination to avoid the duel with Macias on the morrow, which the Duke, in accordance with knightly usage, has been forced to grant, has devised means for assassinating his rival in prison. Naturally, her whole soul is thrown into an effort to save her lover. She bribes his guards. She sends Beatriz to denounce the treachery of her husband to the Duke, and, finally, she herself penetrates into the cell of Macias, to warn him of the fate that threatens him and to persuade him to fly.
It was, indeed, a dramatic moment when the gloom of Macias's cell was first broken by the glimmer of the hand-lamp, which revealed to the vast expectant audience the form of Elvira standing on the threshold, searching the darkness with her shaded eyes; and in the great love scene which followed the first sharp impression was steadily deepened word by word and gesture after gesture by the genius of the actress. Elvira finds Macias in a mood of calm and even joyful waiting for the morrow. His honour is satisfied; death and battle are before him, and the proud Castilian is almost at peace. The vision of Elvira's pale beauty and his quick intuition of the dangers she has run in forcing her way to him produce a sudden revulsion of feeling towards her, a flood of passionate reconciliation; he is at her feet once more; he feels that she is true, that she is his. She, in a frenzy of fear, cannot succeed for all her efforts in dimming his ecstasy of joy or in awakening him to the necessity of flight, and at last he even resents her terror for him, her entreaties that he will forget her and escape.
'Great heaven!' he says, turning from her in despair, 'it was not love, it was only pity that brought her here.' Then, broken down by the awful pressure of the situation, her love resists his no longer, but rather she sees in the full expression of her own heart the only chance of reconciling him to life, and of persuading him to take thought for his own safety.
'Elvira.See, Macias! these tears—each one is yours, is wept for you! Oh, if to soften that proud will of yours this hapless woman must needs open all her weak heart to you, if she must needs tell you that she lives only in your life and dies in your death, her lip will brace itself even to that pitiful confession! Ah me! these poor cheeks have been so blanched with weeping, they have no blushes left.'
To her this supreme avowal is the only means of making him believe her report of his danger, and turn towards flight; but in him it produces a joy which banishes all thought of personal risk, and makes separation from her worse than death. When she bids him fly, he replies by one word, 'Come!' and not till she has promised to guide him to the city gates and to follow him later on his journey will he move a step towards freedom. And then, when her dear hand is about to open to him the door of his prison, it is too late. Fernan and his assassins are at hand, the stairs are surrounded, and escape is cut off. Again, in these last moments, when the locked door still holds between them and the death awaiting them, her mood is one of agonised terror, not for herself, but for him; while he, exalted far above all fear, supports and calms her.
'Macias. Think no more of the world which has destroyed us! We owe it nothing—nothing! Come, the bonds which linked us to it are for ever broken! Death is at the door;we are already dead! Come, and make death beautiful: tell me you love, love, love me to the end!'
Then, putting her from him, he goes out to meet his enemies. There is a clamour outside, and he returns wounded to death, pursued by Fernan and his men. He falls, and Elvira defends him from her husband with a look and gesture so terrible that he and the murderers fall back before her as though she were some ghastly avenging spirit. Then, bending over him, she snatches the dagger from the grasp of the dying man, saying to him, with a voice into which Isabel Bretherton threw a wealth of pitiful tenderness, 'There is but one way left, beloved. Your wife that should have been, that is, saves herself and you—so!'
And in the dead silence that followed, her last murmur rose upon the air as the armed men, carrying torches, crowded round her. 'See, Macias, the torches—how they shine!Bring more—bring more—and light—our marriage festival!'
* * * * *
'Eustace! Eustace! there, now they have let her go! Poor child, poor child! how is she to stand this night after night? Eustace, do you hear? Let us go into her now—quick, before she is quite surrounded. I don't want to stay, but I must just see her, and so must Paul. Ah, Mr. Wallace is gone already, but he described to me how to find her. This way!'
And Madame de Châteauvieux, brushing the tears from her eyes with one hand, took Kendal's arm with the other, and hurried him along the narrow passages leading to the door on to the stage, M. de Châteauvieux following them, his keen French face glistening with a quiet but intense satisfaction.
As for Kendal, every sense in him was covetously striving to hold and fix the experiences of the last half-hour. The white muffled figure standing in the turret door, the faint lamp light streaming on the bent head and upraised arm—those tones of self-forgetful passion, drawn straight, as it were, from the pure heart of love—the splendid energy of that last defiance of fate and circumstance—the low vibrations of her dying words—the power of the actress and the personality of the woman,—all these different impressions were holding wild war within him as he hastened on, with Marie clinging to his arm. And beyond the little stage-door the air seemed to be even more heavily charged with excitement than that of the theatre. For, as Kendal emerged with his sister, his attention was perforce attracted by the little crowd of persons already assembled round the figure of Isabel Bretherton, and, as his eye travelled over them, he realised with a fresh start the full compass of the change which had taken place. To all the more eminent persons in that group Miss Bretherton had been six months before an ignorant and provincial beauty, good enough to create a social craze, and nothing more. Their presence round her at this moment, their homage, the emotion visible everywhere, proved that all was different, that she had passed the barrier which once existed between her and the world which knows and thinks, and had been drawn within that circle of individualities which, however undefined, is still the vital circle of any time or society, for it is the circle which represents, more or less brilliantly and efficiently, the intellectual life of a generation.
Only one thing was unchanged—the sweetness and spontaneity of that rich womanly nature. She gave a little cry as she saw Madame de Châteauvieux enter. She came running forward, and threw her arms round the elder woman and kissed her; it was almost the greeting of a daughter to a mother. And then, still holding Madame de Châteauvieux with one hand, she held out the other to Paul, asking him how much fault he had to find, and when she was to take her scolding; and every gesture had a glow of youth and joy in it, of which the contagion was irresistible. She had thrown off the white head-dress she had worn during the last act, and her delicately-tinted head and neck rose from the splendid wedding-gown of gold-embroidered satin—vision of flowerlike and aerial beauty.
Fast as the talk flowed about her, Kendal noticed that every one seemed to be, first of all, conscious of her neighbourhood, of her dress rustling past, of her voice in all its different shades of gaiety or quick emotion.
'Oh, Mr. Kendal,' she said, turning to him again after their first greeting—was it the magnetism of his gaze which had recalled hers?—'if you only knew what your sister has been to me! How much I owe to her and to you! It was kind of you to come to-night. I should have been so disappointed if you hadn't!'
Then she came closer to him, and said archly, almost in his ear,
'Have you forgiven me?'
'Forgiven you? For what?'
'For laying hands on Elvira, after all. You must have thought me a rash and headstrong person when you heard of it. Oh, I worked so hard at her, and all with the dread of you in my mind!'
This perfect friendly openness, this brightcamaraderieof hers, were so hard to meet!
'You have played Elvira,' he said, 'as I never thought it would be played by anybody; and I was blind from first to last. I hoped you had forgotten that piece of pedantry on my part.'
'One does not forget the turning-points of one's life,' she answered with a sudden gravity.
Kendal had been keeping an iron grip upon himself during the past hours, but, as she said this, standing close beside him, it seemed to him impossible that his self-restraint should hold much longer. Those wonderful eyes of hers were full upon him; there was emotion in them,—evidently the Nuneham scene was in her mind, as it was in his,—and a great friendliness, even gratitude, seemed to look out through them. But it was as though his doom were written in the very candour and openness of her gaze, and he rushed desperately into speech again, hardly knowing what he was saying.
'It gives me half pain, half pleasure, that you should speak of it so. I have never ceased to hate myself for that day. But you have travelled far indeed since theWhite Lady—I never knew any one do so much in so short a time!'
She smiled—did her lip quiver? Evidently his praise was very pleasant to her, and there must have been something strange and stirring to her feeling in the intensity and intimacy of his tone. Her bright look caught his again, and he believed for one wild moment that the eyelids sank and fluttered. He lost all consciousness of the crowd; his whole soul seemed concentrated on that one instant. Surely she must feel it, or love is indeed impotent!
But no,—it was all a delusion! she moved away from him, and the estranging present rushed in again between them.
'It has been M. de Châteauvieux's doing, almost all of it,' she said eagerly, with a change of voice, 'and your sister's. Will you come and see me some time and talk about some of the Paris people? Oh, I am wanted! But first you must be introduced to Macias. Wasn't he good? It was such an excellent choice of Mr. Wallace's. There he is,-and there is his wife, that pretty little dark woman.'
Kendal followed her mechanically, and presently found himself talking nothings to Mr. Harting, who, gorgeous in his Spanish dress, was receiving the congratulations which poured in upon him with a pleasant mixture of good manners and natural elation. A little farther on he stumbled upon Forbes and the Stuarts, Mrs. Stuart as sparkling and fresh as ever, a suggestive contrast in her American crispness and prettiness to the high-bred distinction of Madame de Châteauvieux, who was standing near her.
'Well, my dear fellow,' said Forbes, catching hold of him, 'how is that critical demon of yours? Is he scotched yet?'
'He is almost at his last gasp,' said Kendal, with a ghostly smile, and a reckless impulse to talk which seemed to him his salvation. 'He was never as vicious a creature as you thought him, and Miss Bretherton has had no difficulty in slaying him. But that hall was a masterpiece, Forbes! How have your pictures got on with all this?'
'I haven't touched a brush since I came back from Switzerland, except to make sketches for this thing. Oh, it's been a terrible business! Mr. Worrall's hair has turned gray over the expenses of it; however, she and I would have our way, and it's all right—the play will run for twelve months, if she chooses, easily.'
Near by were the Worralls, looking a little sulky, as Kendal fancied, in the midst of this great inrush of the London world, which was sweeping their niece from them into a position of superiority and independence they were not at all prepared to see her take up; Nothing, indeed, could be prettier than her manner to them whenever she came across them, but it was evident that she was no longer an automaton to be moved at their will and pleasure, but a woman and an artist, mistress of herself and of her fate. Kendal fell into conversation on the subject with Mrs. Stuart, who was as communicative and amusing as usual, and who chattered away to him till he suddenly saw Miss Bretherton signalling to him with her arm in that of his sister.
'Do you know, Mr. Kendal,' she said as he went up to her, 'you must really take Madame de Châteauvieux away out of this noise and crowd? It is all very well for her to preach to me. Take her to your rooms and get her some food. How I wish I could entertain you here; but with this crowd it is impossible.'
'Isabel, my dear Isabel,' cried Madame de Châteauvieux, holding her, 'can't you slip away too, and leave Mr. Wallace to do the honours? There will be nothing left of you to-morrow.'
'Yes, directly, directly! only I feel as if sleep were a thing that did not exist for me. But you must certainly go. Take her, Mr. Kendal; doesn't she look a wreck? I will tell M. de Châteauvieux and send him after you.'
She took Marie's shawl from Kendal's arm and put it tenderly round her; then she smiled down into her eyes, said a low 'good-night, best and kindest of friends!' and the brother and sister hurried away, Kendal dropping the hand which had been cordially stretched out to himself.
'Do you mind, Eustace?' said Madame de Châteauvieux, as they walked across the stage. 'I ought to go, and the party ought to break up. But it is a shame to carry you off from so many friends.'
'Mind? Why, I have ordered supper for you in my rooms, and it is just midnight. I hope these people will have the sense to go soon. Now then, for a cab.'
They alighted at the gate of the Temple, and, as they walked across the quadrangle under a sky still heavy with storm-clouds, Madame de Châteauvieux said to her brother with a sigh: 'Well, it has been a great event. I never remember anything more exciting, or more successful. But there is one thing, I think, that would make me happier than a hundred Elviras, and that is to see Isabel Bretherton the wife of a man she loved!' Then a smile broke over her face as she looked at her brother.
'Do you know, Eustace, I quite made up my mind from those first letters of yours in May, in spite of your denials, that you were very deeply taken with her? I remember quite seriously discussing the pros and cons of it with myself.'
The words were said so lightly, they betrayed so clearly the speaker's conviction that she had made a foolish mistake, that they stung Kendal to the quick. How could Marie have known? Had not his letters for the last three months been misleading enough to deceive the sharpest eyes? And yet he felt unreasonably that she ought to have known—there was a blind clamour in him against the bluntness of her sisterly perception.
His silence was so prolonged that Madame de Châteauvieux was startled by it. She slipped her hand into his arm. 'Eustace!' Still no answer. 'Have I said anything to annoy you—Eustace? Won't you let your old sister have her dreams?'
But still it seemed impossible for him to speak. He could only lay his hand over hers with a brotherly clasp. By this time they were at the foot of the stairs, and he led the way up, Madame de Châteauvieux following in a tumult of anxious conjecture. When they reached his rooms he put her carefully into a chair by the fire, made her take some sandwiches, and set the kettle to boil in his handy bachelor way, that he might make her some tea, and all the time he talked about various nothings, till at last Marie, unable to put up with it any longer, caught his hand as he was bending over the fire.
'Eustace,' she exclaimed, 'be kind to me, and don't perplex me like this.—Oh, my poor old boy, are you in love with Isabel Bretherton?'
'He drew himself to his full height on the rug, and gazed steadily into the fire, the lines of his mobile face settling into repose.
'Yes,' he said, as though to himself; 'I love her. I believe I have loved her from the first moment.'
Madame de Châteauvieux was tremblingly silent, her thoughts travelling back over the past with lightning rapidity. Could she remember one word, one look of Isabel Bretherton's, of which her memory might serve to throw the smallest ray of light on this darkness in which Eustace seemed to be standing? No, not one. Gratitude, friendship, esteem—all these had been there abundantly, but nothing else, not one of those many signs by which one woman betrays her love to another! She rose and put her arm round her brother's neck. They had been so much to one another for nearly forty years; he had never wanted anything as a child or youth that she had not tried to get for him. How strange, how intolerable, that this toy, this boon, was beyond her getting!
Her mute sympathy and her deep distress touched him, while, at the same time, they seemed to quench the last spark of hope in him. Had he counted upon hearing something from her whenever he should break silence which would lighten the veil over the future? It must have been so, otherwise why this sense of fresh disaster?
'Dear Marie,' he said to her, kissing her brow as she stood beside him, 'you must be as good to me as you can. I shall probably be a good deal out of London for the present, and my books are a wonderful help. After all, life is not all summed up in one desire, however strong. Other things are real to me—I am thankful to say. I shall live it down.'
'But why despair so soon?' she cried, rebelling against this heavy acquiescence of his and her own sense of hopelessness. 'You are a man any woman might love. Why should she not pass from the mere friendly intellectual relation to another? Don't go away from London. Stay and see as much of her as you can.'
Kendal shook his head. 'I used to dream,' he said huskily, 'of a time when failure should have come, when she would want some one to step in and shield her. Sometimes I thought of her protected in my arms against the world. But now!'
She felt the truth of his unspoken argument—of all that his tone implied. In the minds of both the same image gathered shape and distinctness. Isabel Bretherton in the halo of her great success, in all the intensity of her new life, seemed to her and to him to stand afar off, divided by an impassable gulf from this simple, human craving, which was crying to her, unheard and hopeless, across the darkness.
A month after the first performance ofElviraKendal returned to town on a frosty December afternoon from the Surrey lodgings on which he had now established a permanent hold. He mounted to his room, found his letters lying ready for him, and on the top of them a telegram, which, as his man-servant informed him, had arrived about an hour before. He took it up carelessly, opened it, and bent over it with a start of anxiety. It was from his brother-in-law. 'Marie is very ill. Doctors much alarmed. Can you come to-night?' He put it down in stupefaction. Marie ill! the doctors alarmed! Good heavens! could he catch that evening train? He looked at his watch, decided that there was time, and plunged, with his servant's help, into all the necessary preparations. An hour and a half later he was speeding along through the clear cold moonlight to Dover, realising for the first time, as he leant back alone in his compartment, the full meaning of the news which had hurried him off. All his tender affection for his sister, and all his stifling sense of something unlucky and untoward in his own life, which had been so strong in him during the past two months, combined to rouse in him the blackest fears, the most hopeless despondency. Marie dead,—what would the world hold for him! Books, thought, ideas—were they enough? Could a man live by them if all else were gone? For the first time Kendal felt a doubt which seemed to shake his nature to its depths.
During the journey his thoughts dwelt in a dull sore way upon the past. He saw Marie in her childhood, in her youth, in her rich maturity. He remembered her in the schoolroom spending all her spare time over contrivances of one kind or another for his amusement. He had a vision of her going out with their mother on the night of her first ball, and pitying him for being left behind. He saw her tender face bending over the death-bed of their father, and through a hundred incidents and memories—all beautiful, all intertwined with that lovely self-forgetfulness which was characteristic of her, his mind travelled down to an evening scarcely a month before, when her affection had once more stood, a frail warm barrier, between him and the full bitterness of a great renunciation. Oh Marie, Marie!
It was still dark when he reached Paris, and the gray winter light was only just dawning when he stopped at the door of his brother-in-law's house in one of the new streets near the Champs Elysées. M. de Châteauvieux was standing on the stairs, his smoothly-shaven, clear-cut face drawn and haggard, and a stoop in his broad shoulders which Kendal had never noticed before. Kendal sprang up the steps and wrung his hand. M. de Châteauvieux shook his head almost with a groan, in answer to the brother's inquiry of eye and lip, and led the way upstairs into the forsakensalon, which looked as empty and comfortless as though its mistress had been gone from it years instead of days. Arrived there, the two men standing opposite to each other in the streak of dull light made by the hasty withdrawal of a curtain, Paul said, speaking in a whisper, with dry lips:
'There is no hope—the pain is gone; you would think she was better, but the doctors say she will just lie there as she is lying now till—till—the end.'
Kendal staggered over to a chair and tried to realise what he had heard, but it was impossible, although his journey had seemed to him one long preparation for the worst. 'What is it—how did it happen?' he asked.
'Internal chill. She was only taken ill the day before yesterday, and the pain was frightful till yesterday afternoon; then it subsided, and I thought she was better—she herself was so cheerful and so thankful for the relief—but when the two doctors came in again, it was to tell me that the disappearance of the pain meant only the worst—meant that nothing more can be done—she may go at any moment.'
There was a silence. M. de Châteauvieux walked up and down with the noiseless step which even a few hours of sickness develop in the watcher, till he came and stood before his brother-in-law, saying in the same painful whisper, 'You must have some food, then I will tell her you are here.'
'No, no; I want no food,—any time will do for that. Does she expect me?'
'Yes; you won't wait? Then come.' He led the way across a little anteroom, lifted a curtain, and knocked. The nurse came, there was a little parley, and Paul went in, while Eustace waited outside, conscious of the most strangely trivial things, of the passers-by in the street, of a wrangle between twogaminson the pavement opposite, of the misplacement of certain volumes in the bookcase beside him, till the door opened again, and M. de Châteauvieux drew him in.
He stepped over the threshold, his whole being wrought up to he knew not what solemn pageant of death and parting, and the reality within startled him. The room was flooded with morning light, a frosty December sun was struggling through the fog, the curtains had just been drawn back, and the wintry radiance rested on the polished brass of the bed, on the bright surfaces of wood and glass with which the room was full, on the little tray of tea-things which the nurse held, and on his sister's face of greeting as she lay back smiling among her pillows. There was such a cheerful home peace and brightness in the whole scene—in the crackling wood fire, in the sparkle of the tea-things and the fragrance of the tea, and in the fresh white surroundings of the invalid; it seemed to him incredible that under all this familiar household detail there should be lying in wait that last awful experience of death.
Marie kissed him with grateful affectionate words spoken almost in her usual voice, and then, as he sat beside her holding her hands, she noticed that he looked pale and haggard.
'Has he had some breakfast, Paul? Oh, poor Eustace, after that long journey! Nurse, let him have my cup, there is some tea left; let me see you drink it, dear; it's so pleasant just to look after you once more.'
He drank it mechanically, she watching him with her loving eyes, while she took one hand from him and slipped it into that of her husband as he sat beside her on the bed. Her touch seemed to have meaning in it, for Paul rose presently and went to the far end of the large room; the nurse carried away the tea-things, and the brother and sister were practically alone.
'Dear Eustace,' she began, after a few pathetic moments of silence, in which look and gesture took the place of speech, 'I have so longed to see you. It seemed to me in that awful pain that I must die before I could gather my thoughts together once more, before I could get free enough from my own wretched self to say to my two dear ones all I wished to say. But now it is all gone, and I am so thankful for this moment of peace. I made Dr. de Chavannes tell me the whole truth. Paul and I have always promised one another that there should never be any concealment between us when either of us came to die, and I think I shall have a few hours more with you.'
She was silent a little; the voice had all its usual intonations, but it was low and weak, and it was necessary for her from time to time to gather such strength as might enable her to maintain the calm of her manner. Eustace, in bewildered misery, had hidden his face upon her hands, which were clasped in his, and every now and then she felt the pressure of his lips upon her fingers.
'There are many things I want to say to you,' she went on. 'I will try to remember them in order. Will you stay with Paul a few days—after—? will you always remember to be good to him? I know you will. My poor Paul, oh if I had but given you a child!'
The passion of her low cry thrilled Eustace's heart. He looked up and saw on her face the expression of the hidden yearning of a lifetime. It struck him as something awful and sacred; he could not answer it except by look and touch, and presently she went on after another pause:
'His sister will come to him very likely—his widowed sister. She has a girl he is fond of. After a while he will take pleasure in her.—Then I have thought so much of you and of the future. So often last night I thought I saw you andher, and what you ought to do seemed to grow plain to me. Dear Eustace, don't let anything I say now ever be a burden to you—don't let it fetter you ever—but it is so strong in me you must let me say it all. She is not in love with you, Eustace—at least, I think not. She has never thought of you in that way; but there is everything there which ought to lead to love. You interest her deeply; the thought of you stands to her as the symbol of all she wants to reach; and then she knows what you have been to all those who trusted you. She knows that you are good and true. I want you to try and carry it farther for her sake and yours.' He looked up and would have spoken, but she put her soft hand over his mouth. 'Wait one moment. Those about her are not people to make her happy—at any time if things went wrong—if she broke down—she would be at their mercy. Then her position—you know what difficulties it has—it makes my heart ache sometimes to think of it. She won my love so. I felt like a mother to her. I long to have her here now, but I would not let Paul send; and if I could think of her safe with you—in those true hands of yours. Oh, you will try, darling?' He answered her huskily and brokenly, laying his face to hers on the pillow.
'I would do anything you asked. But she is so likely to love and marry. Probably there is some one—already. How could it not be with her beauty and her fame? Anybody would be proud to marry her, and she has such a quick eager nature.
'There is no one!' said Marie, with deep conviction in the whispered words. 'Her life has been too exciting—too full of one interest. She stayed with me; I got to know her to the bottom. She would not have hidden it. Only say you will make one trial and I should be content.'
And then her innate respect for another's individuality, her shrinking from what might prove to be the tyranny of a dying wish interposed, and she checked herself. 'No, don't promise; I have no right—no one has any right. I can only tell you my feeling—my deep sense that there is hope—that there is nothing against you. Men—good men—are so often over-timid when courage would be best. Be bold, Eustace; respect your own love; do not be too proud to show it—to offer it!' Her voice died away into silence, only Eustace still felt the caressing touch of the thin fingers clasped round his. It seemed to him as if the life still left in her were one pure flame of love, undimmed by any thought of self, undisturbed by any breath of pain. Oh, this victory of the spirit over the flesh, of soul over body, which humanity achieves and renews from day to day and from age to age, in all those nobler and finer personalities upon whom the moral life of the world depends! How it burns its testimony into the heart of the spectator! How it makes him thrill with the apprehension which lies at the root of all religion—the apprehension of an ideal order—the divine suspicion